Because they won’t use real, physical ballots

oday’s election results in the US seem good. Even Cheeto propaganda sites concede defeat [1, 2] and accept Cheeto was a disaster to the GOP.

I’m meanwhile publishing a series that also, in more recent parts, speaks about the issues of electronic voting:

The more, the merrier

here seems to be further growth in IRC lately, as the number of networks grew and we got quite a few new users in our network.

IRC is not new, it’s almost four decades old. IRC is simple enough that many client applications exist, many ircd (deamon) applications exist, and it’s not too hard to deploy and maintain.

When broligarchs run elections

here is an election coming up in the US. “Decisions [are] outsourced to the highest bidder(s),” a friend has told me, wherein “One dollar : one vote…”

“Elections become auctions, just the way the broligarchs like it. The nations have to choose either millionaires/billionaires/trillionaires or a democracy…”

“Business friendly government” is code for government that gets bribed or compromised to outsource common-wealth to few external actors (sometimes for kickbacks). It is a form of plunder. It’s sold as “jobs”.

In Techrights this was covered in passing under:

• ‘Broligarchs’ Don’t Want Science, They Want Entertainers to Entertain Them (and Make Them Richer)
• Wikipedia – Funded by Slop-pushing Companies and ‘Broligarchs’ – Gave Benefit of the Doubt to Slop, Then Regretted It
• How Can the ‘Broligarchs’ Love Us When They Don’t Even Love Themselves?
• Broligarchs Speech-Policing, Faux ‘Community’ or ‘Hub’ in ‘User-Driven’ Clothing
• What is “Computer Science”? It is What Broligarchs Reject.

And I’m just passing time with our animals until then

ast night the young birds stayed until it was rather dark. I think their biological clock or instincts are maladjusted. They eventually both flew away – at the exact same time – after 6:40PM.

Today it’s a sunny day, well suited for a round of feeding in the park (in the late afternoon) and I urgently need to find a heating body for my fish tank, otherwise the tetras will need to move to Rianne’s tank, which can be warmed up.

I’ll have a good look this morning at the Sunday Market.

The nights are getting cold and sometimes the days too (with gusty winds that make it chilly). We are, after all, just weeks away from Halloween.

We are now 4 weeks away from Techrights@20 (anniversary), so we need to give a thought to plans. It needs not be anything expensive or extravagant, just special.

In a way it’s hard to believe 20 years have passed since I began writing in Techrights. 20 years is two decades or about half my lifetime!

I’ll need to liaise with other Techrights people and figure out how we can collectively mark the milestone.

Maybe Techrights can introduce some major new feature?

Transformer substation

oday I am just 66 days away from the uptime of my laptop being 3 full years:

05:18:23 up 1029 days, 20:30, 3 users

It is so much better than my prior records. I owe that partly to a reliable power grid.

The power grid wasn’t always this reliable. Before we lived next to a large stadium we had some occasional and sometimes long outages. The issue wasn’t always upstream; sometimes there was as issue in the building itself; more than 20 years ago, as a postdoc student, some power outages (repeated) put at risk people’s electronic appliances. The building managers encouraged people to purchase a UPS just for that.

People tend to take things for granted if they work all the time.

GAFAM news

recently published an article about Red Hat and it was accessed over 75,000 times. I didn’t know at the time the exposure would be that big. Had I known so, I’d make the article longer and more detailed.

Since then traffic in Techrights has been better than before, quite consistently. It’s now about 3 times higher than it was 3 years ago. I don’t think it’s all attributable to LLM bots. There’s definitely a lot of legitimate activity going on.

Astonishingly enough, I chose not to read any comment about that article Because “The Orange Site” is full of toxic “bros” who heckle what they link to, they don’t contribute much to the discussion.

And not only youth

recently acquired some decently-priced gifts and one of them – which I had acquired for only a pound – was a non-Sony Discman. It still works OK, despite a few falls (those falls caused only temporary issues), and the CDs cost about 10 pence each. Being “behind” means not just cost-savings; it means owning and keeping (sometimes for a lifetime) one’s music collections.

How do we explain to young people that to own and keep your music used to be normal and should be normal again?

DRM and streaming are regressions.

We see insufficient protests over this.